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Quirks of resumption in Cameroon Pidgin English

Paper · 2025 · Leonel Tadjo Fongang

Summary

This squib asks how far a resumptive pronoun (RP) can diverge in φ-features (person, number, gender) from the phrase it refers back to. It uses new fieldwork from Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE, also called Kamtok), collected from four fluent speakers in Yaounde over two trips. In most contexts CPE pronouns agree with their antecedents. When a direct object is focused in a cleft (Na X (wey) … V am), however, the only acceptable RP is am, the accusative singular inanimate form, whatever the antecedent's features. With lexical nouns this is a number-gender mismatch. With focused pronouns such as mi or wuna it is a full person-number-gender mismatch. The author argues that CPE has two kinds of RPs: those that end movement chains, which allow mismatches, and base-generated ones, which agree. The pattern is modelled with Distributed Morphology tools: am is a minimally specified exponent [acc], selected through the Subset Principle after either NumP deletion (copy-deletion accounts) or an impoverishment rule triggered by focus. The data show that a single language can delete all φ-features in one context. They do not, however, decide between the two theories.

Key points

  • CPE pronoun paradigm: NOM a, yu, i, wi, wuna, dem; ACC mi, yu, yi (animate) / am (inanimate), wi, wuna, dem. Third-person singular accusative contrasts animacy (yi vs am), while dem is unmarked for gender and case.
  • Object focus always takes am, whether the antecedent is animate, plural, or a 1st/2nd-person pronoun. Object topicalization uses matching pronouns, so am appears there only with singular inanimate topics.
  • Other constructions behave differently. Subject focus prefers a gap, or matching dem for some speakers. Focus of an indirect object introduced by fo leaves a gap, and so does adverb focus. Topicalized subjects and benefactives take regular agreeing pronouns.
  • Am itself cannot be focused or topicalized, which the author treats as a sign of a weak pronoun. In the analysis it is listed as /am/ ↔ [acc], and the impoverishment rule [PERS, NUM] → ø applies in focus-object contexts.
  • The facts favour a dynamic deletion domain (Scott 2021; Georgi & Amaechi 2023) over a phase-based account (Van Urk 2018), since deletion must target NumP.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. In CPE, agreement between a pronoun and its antecedent depends on the construction (focus vs topic), so feature matching is not a universal constraint.
  • I2. Paradigm syncretism can be derived from underspecified lexical entries plus a "most specific subset wins" rule (the Subset Principle), rather than by listing every cell.
  • I3. Each claim in the paper is backed by minimal pairs, with the starred (ungrammatical) alternatives given explicitly.
  • I4. Animacy is grammatically encoded in the pronoun choice (yi for animate vs am for inanimate), separately from number.
  • I5. One surface form, am, does two jobs: an ordinary inanimate object pronoun, and a featureless resumptive marker in object focus.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): coreference could switch off person/number/gender checks for pronouns that resume a clefted object, and instead link them to the focused phrase by construction.
  • I2 (tokens): the morphology lexicon could store pronouns with partial feature sets and choose by subset specificity, which yields explainable feature assignments for ambiguous forms like you.
  • I3 (learn): evaluation suites could pair every target sentence with a starred variant as a negative control, checking that the parser or coreference module actually rejects or distinguishes it.
  • I4 (world): entity records could carry an animacy attribute, inferred from pronoun choice where available and checked against the WordNet ontology, to constrain who can be an agent or a possessor.
  • I5 (tree): a UD dialect conversion for pidgin or creole input could tag clefted-object resumptives distinctly, so later stages do not read am in that position as an inanimate referent.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Leipzig UniversityLeipzig · Germany26 works · 8,622 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Leonel Tadjo Fongang. 2025. Quirks of resumption in Cameroon Pidgin English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.20325

@article{fongang2025quirks,
  title = {{Quirks of resumption in Cameroon Pidgin English}},
  author = {Leonel Tadjo Fongang},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.20325},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.20325}
}

References

22 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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